Senators idle as U.S. court cases stack up

We imagine elementary school teachers and principals must hear that phrase in their sleep after mediating lunchroom spats and schoolyard disputes. Most children grow out of their tit-for-tat sense of justice. Unless they are later elected to the U.S. Senate.

Because he died in 2003, we are going to say that Strom Thurmond, a Republican senator from South Carolina, started it. He helped invent the custom of “blue-slipping” federal judicial nominees.

The blue slip is another of those Senate traditions that are no way to run a government. Senators from a judicial nominee’s home state may write the candidate a favorable or unfavorable recommendation or do nothing. If one of the senators does not submit a blue slip, the Senate Judiciary Committee won’t take up the nomination.

It is underhanded but powerful.

But until about 1999, it was a rarity. But in 1999, when Democrats controlled the Senate, they resorted to the tactic half a dozen times to block judges nominated by George W. Bush. Democrats were not surprised when Republicans did the same thing to Barrack Obama’s nominations.

People outside politics were stunned and worried, though, that the GOP retaliated so thoroughly and consistently. Obama’s judicial nominees were confirmed at the slowest pace in more than 60 years. While benches stayed vacant and “judicial emergencies” grew, GOP senators ignored their blue slips. The federal court system a vacant bench with a backlog of hundreds of untried cases a judicial emergency.

President Donald Trump has nominated Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen to the federal appellate bench. By most accounts, Larsen is an excellent judge and good choice. The American Bar Association gives her its top rating. Her former colleagues at the University of Michigan law school said she would be an “outstanding federal judge.”

Except she is a conservative nominated by a Republican president.

And Michigan’s senators are Democrats. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters have not turned in their blue slips, and probably will not. We can almost hear them explaining, “Well, they started it.”